Maggie Gee - The Ice People

I admit I had forgotten Briony.

Until she touched the nape of my neck, very gently, but I winced away, then saw it was her. And she had the gun. She had got the gun, under the cover of the music — Briony was my heroine. The Frenchmen seemed to have forgotten us, gathered round Luke, oblivious. Briony and I were at the back of the crowd. Then I noticed her curious expression — a look of strained concentration. She was frowning across at the other door, which led to the room whose French window I’d smashed — she was gazing at it with fixed horror.

I looked, and saw nothing; just the darkness. And then I realised — then I saw them. Saw them come like the end of a dream.

There were things moving silkily out of the shadows, little animals — no, too smooth to be animals. I looked again. I couldn’t believe it, pullulating, greybrown things, swaying, quivering, almost silent — only the two of us had seen them. A kind of viscous river of life, not properly formed, with a faint oily sheen — as they came into the light I caught a greasy shimmer — and then I smelled them, and knew they were robots, that faint sweet smell of hot xylon that Dora always gave off in action. They had no feathers; they were shiny, slimy, but their body shape was vaguely familiar, the vestigial heads still basically birdlike, with Dora’s wideset stupid eyes, inexpressibly scary in those halfformed faces. A stream of robot foetuses — and yet, no robot had ever harmed me. ‘Don’t worry,’ I mouthed at Briony, just as the first one shot out a long tentacle, a gleaming proboscis, towards the crowd. Jesus, it was pointing straight at Luke. And then something arced in a gleaming whiplash — but Briony — mygod, mygod — she had the carbine in her arms, she hefted it up to her shoulder and shot, a single shattering explosion. Chaos erupted, but I saw, amazed, that she’d hit her target, shot it to pieces, beginner’s luck, the thing jerked, curled, and its tentacle shrivelled with a vile stench of burning. But the other brown beasts swarmed on regardless, unfazed by the explosion, unstoppable, a foul dun current, a river of shit, surging towards the herd of humans.

I pushed straight through to the heart of the crowd and caught my son’s arm as the first brown creature fastened itself to the skin of his elbow. I yanked Luke away, and the gleaming member clung for a second, then lost its grip, with a sucking sound that sickened my stomach — Flinging the duvet round Luke’s body, I stumbled backwards after Briony, and the creatures, mysteriously, swerved away from us, clamping themselves on to the leather jackets, clinging like leeches to arms and shoulders. I saw one slide round Fatty’s neck, and he squirmed and screamed and thrashed at it, then the quick bright flash of its proboscis, and the flesh of his cheek was sliced like chicken — sliced then sucked. One eye was gone. I looked away as blood and bone spattered. Men were being rendered down to meat.

We ploughed through a scrum of falling bodies and stumbled out into the hall, and there, by a miracle, was Dora, where the musicians must have left her. Luke and I snatched her up in our arms, the front door yielded, we fell down the steps. Behind us there were noises like belling cattle; they were human beings, but they died like cattle. As a child I’d lived near a slaughterhouse; you never forget the sound of terror. I pushed Luke and Dora into the car, with Dora sprawled across my son, and Briony jumped in and slammed the door –

We screeched past the file of cars in the drive, then helterskelter down the road.

When you’re very afraid, you don’t feel pain. Later I found out that my humerus was fractured, but endorphins, the body’s own natural lullane, ensured that I hardly noticed it hurting until we were fifty kilometres away, and then I realised I couldn’t go on, and handed over to Briony. We simply drove, too shocked to speak, after the first little frenzy of swearwords.

The sky was faintly yellow, an hour before sunrise, when Luke spoke up from the back of the car.

‘What were they?’ he asked me. ‘They were … disgusting .’

‘Must be some French invention,’ I answered. I know it sounds stupid, but I hadn’t understood.

‘No,’ said Briony ‘I don’t think so. I think they were mutants. Mutant Doves.’

‘Mygod,’ I said. ‘Yes. Of course. You know, I’ve never seen a mutant. I guess that life mutates very fast when a generation only takes a day —’

‘With highly developed SD and R. Which was always a bit of a euphemism. Remember those Hawks. They were meant to be guard-dogs … “Self-Defend” meant “Attack”, didn’t it —?’

“‘Recycle” meant “Eat”. Doves eat anything. Seemed like an advantage when they were pets.’ (And yet, it hadn’t always been an advantage. My vanished cat. The bald patch of earth.)

‘Did you see how their colours had degraded?’ she asked. ‘Bright colours don’t help them survive. Wicca had to deal with a lot like that. They were a pack. A hunting pack .’

I suddenly recalled the old man in the village who’d told me to ‘watch out for the others’. This was what he meant — mutants, not wild boys. ‘Why did they go for the musicians, not us?’

She was concentrating on the road, whose surface had suddenly changed to cart tracks. With every bump, the pain in my shoulder was hellish. After a while the road improved, and she answered me. ‘Maybe because of their clothes. Leather and nuskin are both organic. Very digestible. Particularly nuskin — that cloned goatskin is so soft. And Luke was naked. The most tempting of all. In fact, that duvet probably saved him. The case is synthetic. Which I thought was a pity … I’ve changed my mind. Luke, you were so brave — ’

Luke said sternly ‘We shouldn’t have left. I mean, they were … human. So are we.’

I didn’t feel good about it either, and yet I was glad we had got away. ‘Your musical friends made a nice mess of my arm. Go to sleep, Luke. I was proud of you.’

I think of it still: I try to remember. Both utterly strange and horribly familiar, the scavenging things coming after us. In my mind I can never see them clearly, and yet we all sensed what they were. The nightmare end of the robot dream. Shimmering, stinking, sucking us down. We knew so much, understood so little, we ran when we could hardly stand — leaving the mess, the shit behind us. Then in the end it followed us.

And I think of my son: Luke singing, naked. My wild boy, brave, uncorrupted.

What did he see, looking out at us, the haggard faces in the audience?

Cults and castes and loneliness. The ravenous need of a world grown old.

Why did our children run away?

As we drove into the mountains, as we took the first foothills, I couldn’t help feeling happy, despite my exhaustion, watching Briony’s profile against the sunrise, beautiful Briony breasting the dawn — Briony was an amazing woman. Kind, and brave, and — tender — and lucky, because shooting that robot, with her first shot — she had saved Luke’s life. I could never thank her. Yet when we were alone (which was very rarely) I only seemed to talk about Sarah.

‘I’m falling asleep,’ she muttered, and opened the window to freshen her head. The air was marvellous, bitter cold, and I smelled the sharp green scent of the firs. There were churches, or rather the ruins of churches, for as we drew closer we could see the damage, pretty Romanesque buildings a millennium old that had probably been looted quite recently, their rafters bare of tiles and blackened, some of them hacked off, I suppose for firewood, their beautiful arched windows blinded, the stone nibbled by giant rats. To stand for over a thousand years, and then be ruined in a generation …!